BROCKTON – Matthew Swenson, 32, is a chemistry student at Massasoit Community College and a pizza delivery driver. He lives in Brockton’s Lithuanian Village, in a house behind The Lit bar, where a man was shot and killed Friday afternoon.

If Swenson had the money, he said he would leave the city – the only home he has known and a place where he said the kind of violent crime that erupted this week is all too common.

“Enough is enough,” Swenson said. “It’s not the warm weather. This is normal in this neighborhood. If something could have been done, it would have been done.”

Just a few hours after police found a man stabbed to death on Green Street on Friday morning, someone entered the back door of The Lit and shot 21-year-old Elson Miranda twice in the chest. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Earlier in the week, a 26-year-old Brockton man was shot outside a North Warren Avenue home. Four men have been arrested in connection with that shooting.

On Tuesday, 10 shots were fired during a fight on Westland Street. On Wednesday, a woman was robbed at gunpoint at the Centre Street CVS.

Several residents watching police investigate the fatal shooting Friday expressed a similar hopelessness about the prevalence of violent crime in Brockton.

“This is not my cup of tea,” said Annie Branch, 56, who lives around the corner from the bar.

She also said she would like to move out of Brockton and back home to Connecticut.

Fleeing the city is not the answer for city officials, who say they are doing everything they can to address the violence, from heightening police patrols in targeted neighborhoods to working with troubled landlords to redevelop crime-prone properties like The Lit.

Mayor Bill Carpenter, during his campaign for office last year, released a detailed plan to combat crime in the city, arguing that his approach, to include saturated enforcement and counter-insurgency operations like those used by the U.S. military, would go a long way toward quelling the violence.

Facing three killings in a little more than three months, Carpenter said this week that he and Police Chief Robert Hayden are more focused than ever.

They are rolling out a new motorcycle unit within the next couple weeks, bolstering the police presence in neighborhoods like the Lithuanian Village, collaborating with the state police and sheriff’s office, and will be asking businesses to install private security cameras to help with crime investigation and deterrence.

“We are very proactively going after these folks,” Carpenter said. “I’m pissed and so is (Hayden) and we’re not going to tolerate it. We’re not accepting this for a minute. This just strengthens our resolve.”

Page 2 of 2 - Increasing police patrols in troubled neighborhoods should have a real effect, said Ward 5 Councilor Dennis DeNapoli. In fact, he said under Carpenter and Hayden, he sees more cruisers and police on the streets now than any time in the last 40 years.

Yet the violence persists.

“I don’t think anybody really has the answer to correct violence when people don’t respect other people,” DeNapoli said. “Society today – people are quicker to respond in violence than to walk away and brush it off.”

Paul Sullivan, a tax appraiser and city resident, points to the inequities of the justice system. Criminals typically get many chances, short sentences and more often than not a “slap on the wrist,” he said.

“The victim has no rights, in a sense, and the criminal gets everything,” Sullivan said.

Ward 6 Councilor Michelle DuBois, who represents the neighborhood around The Lit, said she is focused on redeveloping troubled properties like the “murder bar,” as it’s known, and turning them into housing for families.

She said the village is in the process of bouncing back, that she sees more people walking around the neighborhood and more houses being built, but that a bar like The Lit is a magnet for gang activity, drugs and prostitution.